The purpose of the latest PETA exhibit was
not to compare humans to animals. It was to show the parallels
between human and animal SUFFERING and to remind people that at one time
the exploitation and maltreatment of certain people was accepted, even
though, in retrospect, we can ALL agree that it was completely
unethical. There is nothing wrong or inappropriate about comparing
human and (other) animal suffering. Animals feel pain (physical,
emotional, and psychological) just like people do. I have been a
nurse for over 25 years and have devoted my life to helping people.
When I see someone in pain or discomfort it's my instinct to try to
alleviate that pain. That is the reason I became a nurse and it is
also the reason I became vegetarian. I had always loved
animals and rescued many cats, dogs, and birds. In the 80's I saw
the Animals Film by Victor Schonfeld and Miriam Alaux. In it the
horrors of factory farming, stockyard and slaughterhouse abuse and animal
experimentation were exposed. I became a vegetarian
overnight and have remained one since. Many members of my mother's
extended family (who weren't lucky enough to escape from Europe in time)
were killed in the Holocaust. When I read about PETA's Holocaust on
Your Plate campaign I was not offended by the comparisons. In my
opinion, there are parallels we cannot deny. Suffering is
suffering. Compassion is compassion. It doesn't matter what
particular species of sentient being one is discussing. People need
to evolve and to start to look outside their little cubicles and begin to
develop compassion and respect for all forms of life. Gandhi, Albert
Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, George Bernard Shaw, Isaac Bashevis Singer,
and Alice Walker are just a few of the people who also promoted this
concept.Philosopher Jeremy Bentham put it best: "The question is not:
'Can they reason?' nor 'Can they talk?' but 'Can they suffer?'"All
animals can suffer and therefore deserve to be treated
humanely.

Rina Deych

Rina's Recommended reading:

Commentary by Karen Davis, president
of United Poultry Concerns:

From:
Chicago
Sun-Times

Letters to the
Editor

Animal suffering similar to human slaves'

September 6, 2005

African Americans and other groups have expressed outrage over a PETA
exhibit that compares animal slavery with human slavery. Yet not so long
ago, anyone who dared to compare black people with white people in my
neighborhood provoked similar outrage. As a 1960s civil rights activist, I
fought with my parents and others incessantly over this point.

Now, as then, I uphold these dreaded comparisons. Reduction of a
sensitive being to an object imprisoned in a world outside any moral
universe of care links the human slave to the animal slave in
laboratories, factory farms and slaughterhouses in ways that diminish the
differences between them. Instead of bickering over who's superior and
who's inferior, why not own up to the preventable suffering we cause and
do what we can to stop it?

Resentment of comparisons between the suffering of humans and the
suffering of animals in conditions of atrocity is not an isolated
attitude, anyway. It's part of a broader psychology of resentment at
having one's suffering linked with that of anyone else.

Resentment aside, it is reasonable to assume that animals in
confinement systems designed to exploit them suffer even more, in certain
respects, than do humans similarly confined, just as a child or a mentally
challenged person might experience dimensions of suffering in being
rough-handled, imprisoned, and shouted at that people capable of
conceptualizing the experience can't conceive of.

Indeed, those who are capable of conceptualizing their own suffering
may be unable to grasp what it feels like to suffer without being able to
conceptualize it.

But even if it could be proven that chickens and other animals suffer
less than humans in similar situations, this would not mean these animals
do not suffer profoundly or justify harming them. Our cognitive distance
from animal suffering constitutes neither an argument nor evidence as to
who suffers more under horrific circumstances, humans or nonhumans.

If we cannot imagine what it must be like for a bird or a sheep or a
cow to be placed in a situation comparable to a human being shoved in a
cattle car packed with other terrified people headed toward death; if we
cannot imagine how chickens must feel being grabbed by their legs in the
middle of the night by men who are cursing at them while pitching and
stuffing them into the crates in which they will travel to the next wave
of terror at the slaughterhouse, then perhaps we should try to imagine
ourselves placed helplessly in the hands of an overpowering
extraterrestrial species, to whom our pleas for mercy sound like nothing
more than bleats and squeals and clucks -- mere ''noise'' to the master
race in whose ''superior'' minds we are ''only animals.''